Friday, May 1, 2015

Happy May! Things are looking a bit lush here in North Carolina! Our school is gearing up for the annual standardized testing ritual. No one enjoys it much, or at all.

This is a repost, actually a combo of Verbs materials. The bottom half of this post is a repost from 2013 which highlights all the animal verbs interactive books. You need verbs to communicate! These books have them.

------------------------------------------below is a repost from 2013-----------------------------

I like to make interactive books. The reason for making my own, or adapting the ones I find, is simple---the leveled readers in our school book room simply aren't designed to teach language. Vocabulary is often not controlled, and the syntax structures become too complex early on. The school's books are designed for typical language learners who need to learn to read. My adapted books are designed for kids, who may be able to 'word call' a bit, but need to learn sentence structure and vocabulary.

One little problem with this blog is that I've uploaded things and written blog posts randomly--one day I'll write about an app I like, the next day I'll blog about an adapted book, while the third day, I'll post about a member of my family. This randomness will continue, but this blog entry is to cluster a few postings.

This page is to highlight the adapted books on my blog that illustrate verbs. Each blog post has a free book to download. In addition, Boardmaker icons are included with each so you can adapt your own books--use velcro, laminate pages, bind them, and keep the books for your own collections--or don't laminate and velcro (it depends upon what you have available---some of you readers are don't have the resources I'm lucky to have.) Use stuffed animals for the kids to act the verbs out. Compare and contrast, count, comment, laugh---my kids really love these books! Language and reading should have a 'fun' component.

Thank you so much for posting all of these fantastic materials to use with our kiddos who have functional communication needs! I have a diverse caseload made up of kids coming from gen-ed classrooms as well as special-ed self-contained classrooms. There are a lot of speech/language blogs out there, but not a lot that feature ideas and materials for working with our students with the most basic of communication needs. As one of your readers who has a similar passion for working with these students, I thank you so much for generously sharing your creativity and expertise!